BUY! BUY! MY DARLING!: HOW TO GET A NEW YORK CITY APARTMENT THE PULP FICTION WAY

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"You have to get the bank the [pertinent] information [about the building] — the financials, the offering plan, all of that — and make sure the bank approves," she went on. "The broker traditionally gets all that from the managing agent as soon as [the broker gets] the listing. The bank also can do that. It's all done by phone, e-mail and fax. Nobody does anything in person at that level."

So far, so good. But now I had to leave the dame behind for a while. Where I was going, she couldn't go. I had to go see the woman they called...The Seller.

The Seller: The Long Goodbye

She was dark and sultry and went by an alias, Antoinette Blanco. And earlier this year she'd sold her prewar co-op on the Upper West Side. She was ready to talk. I was ready to listen. 

"Be careful who you hire as a real-estate broker," she warned me. "Make sure their priority is to sell the apartment for what it's worth and not try to rush the deal to just sell it and go on to the next client." And how do you do all that? I wondered. "A lot of it is through the reputation of the firm — and also instinct. Do you think they're competent and will do a good job? Are they going to spend enough time on your apartment?"

Be careful who you hire as a broker.

Make sure their priority is to sell the

apartment for what it's worth and not

rush the deal to get to the next client.

It all sounded vague to me, like the kind promises you make at the end of a long night. But I got it. You can look at all the Internet chatter you want about this broker or that, about big companies versus boutiques, and you can get word-of-mouth recommendations from doormen, people in your building, friends, co-workers. But it all comes down to this: Do you think the broker'll have your back when the buyers start lowballing?

For Blanco, the going had been rougher than back-shelf bourbon. The place she'd sold was a bright and roomy two-bedroom with polished hardwood floors, original molding, classic mosaic-tile bathrooms, and — the one drawback — a kitchen that hadn't been remodeled since the days of wine and roses. So the broker wrote in the ad, "needs TLC."

"I thought that was unnecessary," said Blanco, as though someone had slapped her. "The appliances could have used upgrading but 'needs TLC' makes you think there are holes in the walls and peeling paint, and that wasn't the case." I made a mental note to tell the dame not to pay too much attention to listings lingo. Look at the online photos and see the place for yourself.

And you need to do that last part more than my mother's stew needs salt. That's because of this new thing called "virtual staging," where you Photoshop furniture into a picture of the place, and put it online.

A Swell-Looking Place

"By law, [the ad or listing] has to say it's virtually staged," Miriam told me later, at my place, over two stiff drinks. "We do it for empty apartments, since empty apartments look like crap on a website. We have a marketing company that virtually stages an apartment so that it looks swanky," she went on. "Not to trick the buyer, but to have them see a space with stuff in it and have a sense of what it would look like with proportionate furniture." I could live with that — better than I could live with a bullet from her roscoe if she'd ever decided I'd crossed her.

I hooked up again with the dame after she'd found a co-op apartment and had had her offer accepted. That sounds simple, but it wasn't: She and her broker had to compare the seller's asking price with what other apartments were selling for in the building and in the neighborhood. Then they'd factored in how long the place had been on the market and how badly the seller wanted to sell.

Even before reaching that point, the dame's broker had to vet her finances and make sure — as best as one could, since co-op boards don't routinely blab about it — that those finances were good enough for the board.

"It's deductive reasoning," said a shadowy broker who wouldn't give me her name but who seemed to know her stuff. "You may have colleagues who have worked that building and can give you information; you look online at sites like StreetEasy and PropertyShark … although random database info might not be accurate," she warned. "When the managing agent sends the broker a sales application, that also gives you an idea of what's needed. And the seller's broker should be able to find out what the co-op usually wants beyond the sales price," such as requiring that the buyer have anywhere from two months' to two years' worth of mortgage and maintenance in the bank, or even more.

And then, just as the case was getting interested, I had to talk to guy they called … The Lawyer.

Continued in Part 2

Adapted from Habitat February 2012. For the complete article and more, join our Archive >>